Polling suggests that Minnesotans are generally happy with the highest elected representatives in the state. Both Governor Mark Dayton and Senator Al Franken appear to have the edge in their reelection campaigns.

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Nope, we are sinking into a morass of poverty, corruption and despair because we are no longer insulated from the rest of the world. And, speaking of insulation, winter is coming.

kevinfromminneapolis

lol

Nick

You know nothing, Jon Snow

PaulJ

ITN or Game of Thrones?

JQP

yes.

Folderol

I think I’m gonna hurl

Jim G

Yes. Progressive government gives us the best chance to address the social and economic problems our periodic business cycle implosions cause. Lately, over the last two or three decades, American capitalism produced many more casualties than winners. Economic casualties that are not addressed by our businesses because they are just an unavoidable cost of doing business. Business apologists wash their hands of these problems. Businesses, they say, are not responsible because it’s the “free market’s cold hand” that pushes America’s workers and middle class aside.

Mark Dayton and the DFL controlled Legislature has put us back onto a path where workers and the middle classes priorities are not lost in the forest of business lobbyists surrounding our state government seeking to add language to laws that make their specific fleecing our our state “legal”. I support Governor Dayton and the DFL leadership’s actions since regaining control of government. Thank you Minnesota for voting for progressive government. We are on the right path.

Hey Der

Government intervention has delayed, then exacerbated the boom and bust cycles.

Yanotha Twangai

You have that exactly backwards. It’s countercyclical government programs (e.g., unemployment insurance, worker retraining programs, etc.) that moderate the booms and busts, which are caused by the chaos of laissez faire capitalism.

Hey Der

Attempted government moderation sometimes becomes a delay of the inevitable and, in the meantime, creates an artificial government funded incentive (boom) to continuing the bad behavior which will eventually cause the bust. By continuing and even encouraging the bad behavior, the bust becomes ever larger.

The housing boom was, in part, caused by the federal government coercing lenders to make loans they never would have if they were risking their own money. As the fed guaranteed the return of the loan principal, the only thing that mattered to lenders was writing more loans.

Yanotha Twangai

The evidence is against you. Before the Great Depression there was a boom-and-bust cycle every decade or two. Then, from the days of FDR’s New Deal (government intervention) until about 2000 the economy was much more stable and grew fairly steadily. It was excessive deregulation, the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the rolling back of government spending, and failure to regulate things like derivatives and credit default swaps that destabilized the economy. The economy was overheated when it nearly went over the cliff in 2008. Keynes was right.

Hey Der

I’m with you on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, but the government put incentives into place for bankers to loan to unqualified borrowers, and they also threatened sanctions for not lending to unqualified borrowers, even though the credit history wasn’t there to support those loans. The government was an active, if unaware, catalyst in the creation of bad credit default swaps.

And, yes, government intervention CAN work to moderate small swings, but like I said, if it’s not a small swing, it will exacerbate the problem by 1. masking the problem, 2. insulating the behavior which should be changed from the natural effects of the market, 3. punishing those who understand natural market forces for their refusal to buckle to political pressure, and 4. forcing the costs of these bad decisions down the throats of the taxpayers.

And, in case you missed it, the government is again pushing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lower standards and restrictions on borrowers with weak credit. Here we go again…

Yanotha Twangai

Just an observation— radical socialists and free-market fundamentalists have this in common: Both are committed to following the program their ideology says should work and are resistant to evidence and experience of what does work, insisting that failures are due to faulty implementation of the program, not the ideology itself. Keynes was attacked from both ends, which I take as prima facie evidence that he was onto something.

Hey Der

I’m giving you a concrete, specific example of what doesn’t work – of what the problem was this last time around. This isn’t an example of radical socialists saying that socialism only failed everywhere it’s been tried because they weren’t in charge.

I’m just saying quit trying to control from the top down that which will control itself from the bottom up. Free markets work because people will act in their own self interest. In doing so, by default, they act in the best interest of others by creating a product or providing a needed service.

I think perhaps that ‘should work’ ideology has been adopted by too many MPR listeners. In the words of Thomas Sowell, “Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.”

Capitalism – free markets – they work.

Yanotha Twangai

Except that totally free markets don’t work, if by “work” you mean reliably provide a decent living for everyone and raise the overall well being of humanity without leaving large numbers in grinding poverty. The idea that everyone acting in their own self interest (however enlightened) will somehow make everything better is just as ideologically based as the idea that if we would only abolish private property (as Marxism prescribes) then everyone will stop acting selfishly and work together for the common good. Free market capitalism by itself will not build roads and bridges for public use, educate poor children, provide health care for the indigent, prevent economic exploitation of the vulnerable, reign in predatory business practices, prevent ecological catastrophe, etc. And we certainly don’t want to turn things like law enforcement and national defense over to private enterprise. (Imagine the abuses that would result if all policing was done by rent-a-cops.) Free markets do a pretty good job (indeed, better than government can) of providing most goods and services people need, but public works, social safety net programs, law enforcement, environmental and business regulations, national defense, and anything else that is everybody’s responsibility in general but no one’s in particular, are best done by government. To say categorically that everything gets done better if it’s done by the private sector is pure ideology, not based on evidence or experience.

We’ve added more and more programs raising taxes along the way for each of them, and once a program is established, it never ends. We need cuts – not smaller increases that we call cuts – across the board – from social programs to defense. The government is involved in way more areas of our lives than it should be.

By protecting people and markets from their actions, we’re being ENABLERS, like the wife of the alcoholic, making excuses for their behavior, etc. Please check out this link and apply the enabling behavior to political policies:

Where we apparently disagree, then, is where to draw the line. The idea of shrinking government has been ascendant since the 1980 election (when I sided with Reagan, btw), and it seems to me that somewhere in the decades leading up to the 2008 crash, it went too far. You seem to be saying it hasn’t gone far enough yet. I think the evidence is on my side. (You may argue that government spending has been expanding in absolute terms, but when you factor in inflation, population growth, and economic expansion, in relative terms it clearly has not.)

Hey Der

I agree – that’s where we disagree 😉

I’m guessing we also disagree on who should pay, how much they should pay, and the appropriate size of the national debt, but I think those are topics for another day.

As Kang once said: “My fellow Americans. As a young boy, I dreamed of being a baseball; but tonight I say, we must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!”

Do you have an actual example of how MN is " plunging straight down toward disaster at supersonic speed"??

Nick

We’ve got 4.1% unemployment (and dropping). We’ve got a budget surplus. The school shift is paid off. Everywhere I look I see new construction. “Now hiring” signs are ubiquitous. Yes, we’re very clearly headed in the right direction.

FarmGirlWithPitchfork

Minnesota is fortunate to have elected representatives that usually do the correct actions to represent We the People. We have a State Auditor (Rebecca Otto) that keeps state government accountable on monies spent. We have an Attorney General (Lori Swanson) that uses state resources to go after businesses that try to victimize or rip off Minnesotans. We have a Secretary of State (Mark Ritchie) that has championed the voting rights of Minnesotans. Unfortunately, we also have Congressman John Kline in the US Congress, elected by the voters of the 2nd Congressional District. Kline is a buddy of Speaker Boehner and Chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Because Kline uses the power of his office to protect for-profit educational institutions from regulation that would restrict their ability to straight-jacket students into debt (getting degrees that have little or no value in the workplace), thousands of students, not just in Minnesota, but all across the nation, are saddled with debts that will take them years to pay off. (Debts that cannot be refinanced.) The AG has “job security” in prosecuting the bad apples in Minnesota, but that is little consolation to the students that are enslaved by this debt. Unfortunately, this #21stCenturySlavery is legal in the USA, and it’s enabled by Congress! The pitfalls of #Compromise as a necessary element to passing federal legislation.

Hey Der

Last year’s $2 Billion tax hike? We are not headed in the right direction.

David P.

What would you propose in getting the state’s financial books in order? There wasn’t enough budget to cut to make up the debt TPaw racked up.

Len

Depending on the political party you support it is either going right or very wrong…lol

Roy Wehking

No. Too many taxes and government control. Get back to freedom and people control. Cost of living is killing us.

Dave M

Looks like somebody learned their talking points!

Peatbogjeff

No.

We are gravely wrong about abortion, and are strangely supportive of it compared to our brothers and sisters in the Dakotas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Kansas etc.

The midwest is where this troubled country looks for a moral imagination, and here we are failing.

I blame the liberal metro area, which has succumbed to the darkly secular vision of the democratic party, whose demonic Barack Obama has pitched us into the bloody culture of death. Mark Dayton and Al Franken, all democrats, and all who support the sinful abortion industry are also guilty.

We can find the way back if we look towards heaven for help. Events are unfolding that will touch every life in Minnesota, and if we don’t ask for divine help with the fires of evil burning like never before we will have only ourselves to blame. Step one is to stop all abortions. This is the purest form of terrorism and no rights matter if the right to life is disrespected.

John

“Abortion” isn’t in the question today. I went back and looked.

Sheri Smith

To quote the Star Tribune this weekend; “Minnesota is back where it belongs. It has resumed its strong position among Midwestern states”. Thank you Governor Dayton.

a_tribe_called_chris

Overall. Yes!

I do not support Dayton and I don’t see any “leadership” from him that is responsible for our state’s economic success. We also have him to thank for the pathetic medical cannabis bill that will help hardly anyone.

With that said, we are doing well as demonstrated by our low unemployment and relatively high wages. The COL here isn’t bad either. The Metro is doing great and the is where almost 2/3rds of us live anyway.

I would say yes, MN is generally on the right track. Unfortunately, I feel that MPR is increasingly on the wrong track – more sensationalism all the time.

David

YES, indeed.

Shamman

Minnesota is moving on the right track, but is lurching forward rather than sprinting. The reason is well reflected in the other comments made here – some radical right wing, some quite progressively left. The only thing both sides can agree on is that no one trusts the other side. The “scorched earth” approach toward governing must end.

Hey Der

a reflection mirrored again by your characterization of right wing people as radical versus a more moderate adjective for left wing radicals…